Community Feedback on #MicrosoftViva and #EXP

With the announcement of Microsoft Viva and the company’s intent to expand their role within the $300 billion Employee Experience (EXP) space, the response from the community has been varied. Per the announcement, Viva’s goal is to “bring tools for employee engagement, learning, wellbeing and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of people’s work.” As someone who has been working in the broader information management and collaboration space for most of my 30 year career, the application of the latest AI and cognitive services to help organizations not only surface their content, but to better align this content and the tools we use to the culture of our organizations is both exciting and (IMO) the logical next step for the corporate intranet. However, I’m interested in hearing other perspectives — especially from practitioners who have already been testing out the latest Microsoft Viva capabilities.

For the next #CollabTalk TweetJam on Thursday, February 18th at 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern we will gather as a community to discuss “Creating an Employee Experience Platform”  and share these different perspectives and real-world examples. Anyone can participate in this community discussion as we share feedback, ideas, insights, and impacts relating to enterprise collaboration within the Microsoft stack (Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Yammer, and other workloads).

You can join the community discussion using Twitter and the #CollabTalk hashtag or your favorite Twitter platform. You do not need to be an “expert” to participate in the online conversation, and can ask questions, comment on the questions posed, or just “lurk” in the background. These online discussions are open to anyone — you do not have to be on the panel to participate.

This month’s tweetjam is being sponsored by tyGraph and AvePoint. Thanks for your support!

If you have never participated in one of these tweetjams, it’s pretty simple: anyone can jump in and share their thoughts, or just lurk in the wings and absorb the wisdom of the crowd. Either way, it’ll be a TON of content to consume in a single hour. You can follow the live session using the Twitter UI of your choice (Twitter.com, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, whatever). How it works is that I’ll post a series of questions every few minutes, and people will respond to Q1, Q2, Q3 and so forth with A1, A2, A3, always including the #CollabTalk hashtag with their answers. Feel free to reply as often (or as little) as you’d like, ask your own follow up questions, share relevant links, re-tweet others, and engage with the audience.

The questions we will discuss during the session include:

1. What aspects of #MicrosoftViva are you most interested in using within your own organization?
2. What can/should customers do to prepare for using #MicrosoftViva?
3. In your opinion, what is the target customer profile for #MicrosoftViva?
4. What are your thoughts on #MicrosoftViva as a brand, and how does it fit with the #Office365 and #Microsoft365 brands?
5. How much of a role does Employee Experience (#EXP) play within your current Modern Workplace strategy?
6. What pieces would you say are still missing from Microsoft’s Employee Experience (#EXP) strategy?
7. Overall, do you think #MicrosoftViva will help drive better #Microsoft365 adoption, or will it cause more complexity and confusion?

As always, there will be side-questions, side-conversations, and wise-cracking throughout. This is open to the public, so please join in the discussion! The dialog is always thought-provoking and fun.

Participating on this panel (so far):

• Chris McNulty (@cmcnulty2000), director of product marketing at Microsoft
• Martina Grom (@magrom), co-founder of atwork.at, Office 365 MVP and Microsoft Regional Director
• Dux Raymond Sy (@meetdux), Microsoft Regional Director, SharePoint MVP, and Chief Brand Officer at AvePoint
• Simon Denton (@buildbod), Office Apps & Services MVP, visiting professor at Birmingham City University, and business architect at Mott MacDonald
• Nicki Borell (@NickiBorell), Microsoft MVP & RD, evangelist & consultant for SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure
• Sue Hanley (@susanhanley), SharePoint MVP, portal, KM, and SharePoint consultant
• Matt Varney (@thevarnish), intranet manager at KCTCS
• Ed Senez (@edsenez), president at UnlimitedViz and TyGraph
• Sharon Weaver (@sharoneweaver), Microsoft Regional Director, consultant, trainer and ceo of Smarter Consulting
• Ragnar Heil (@ragnarh), Office Servers & Services MVP and Microsoft alliance manager EMEA for Metalogix
• Heather Severino (@HeatherSeverino), Office Apps & Services MVP, MCT Regional Lead, MOS Master, MCP, MT and owner at TeachUTech
• Randy Drisgill (@drisgill), SharePoint MVP and branding and design expert at Rackspace
• Alex Terentiev (@alexaterentiev), Office Development MVP, member of the PnP team, solution architect and developer for SharePointalist
• Eric Overfield (@ericoverfield), Microsoft Regional Director, SharePoint MVP, and founder of PixelMill
• Tracy Van der Schyff (@tracyvds), Office Servers and Services MVP and principal at The GUIDstuff
• Adam Ball (@AdamCBall), co-founder of COUCUG, Teams and Skype for Business MVP
• Hal Hostetler (@TVWizard), Microsoft MVP and senior field engineer and social media coordinator for Roland, Schorr & Tower
• John Peluso (@johnconnected), Microsoft Regional Director, and chief product officer at AvePoint
• Laura Rogers (@WonderLaura), SharePoint MVP, consultant, and owner of IW Mentor
• Theresa (Eller) Lubelski (@SharePointMadam), SharePoint consultant at Constellation Solutions
• Wes Preston (@idubbs), SharePoint MVP, evangelist,  and owner at TrecStone
• Tobiasz Koprowski (@KoprowskiT), Data Platform MVP, founder and consultant at Shadowland Consulting
• David Patrick (@DavidEPatrick),  Office Servers & Services MVP, user group organizer, subject matter expert with DSA, Inc.
• Mike Maadarani (@mikemaadarani), Office Apps & Services MVP, cloud solution architect at MCM Consulting
• John White (@diverdown1964), dual SharePoint and Data Platform MVP, cto at UnlimitedViz and tyGraph
• Norm Young (@stormin_30), Office Apps & Services MVP, director of collaborative analytics at UnlimitedViz
• Jeff Willinger (@jwillie), Office 365 MVP and independent consultant
• Ben Stegink (@benstegink), SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure consultant, owner of Intelligink, LLC
• Eric Riz (@rizinsights), SharePoint MVP and ceo of Empty Cubicle
• Emily Mancini (@EEmancini), Microsoft MVP, PnP team member, architect at Sympraxis Consulting
• Thomas Duff (@duffbert), SharePoint software engineer at Cambia Health
• Kevin McDonnell (@kevmcdonk), solutions architect at CPS
• Asif Rehmani (@asifrehmani), consultant, trainer and SharePoint MVP at VisualSP
• Sean McDonough (@spmcdonough), SharePoint MVP and chief technology officer at BitStream Foundry LLC
• Adnan Amin (@adnan_amin), Office Apps & Services MVP, #SharePoint architect and technology evangelist
• David Drever (@DavidMDrever), Office Apps & Services MVP, senior manager and enterprise architect at Protiviti
• and your host, Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet), Microsoft MVP & RD, founder & ceo of CollabTalk LLC

If you would like to be included on one of these panels, please drop me a line via email, LinkedIn, or Twitter. And thank you again to tyGraph for your support of these CollabTalk tweetjams! And finally, if you are interested in being a sponsor of a future tweetjam, please contact me.